1.Â Introduction

The default system compiler as of FreeBSD 8.0 is
GCC version 4.2.1. In addition, the
base system of FreeBSD includes binutils
version 2.15. These versions are several years old and lack,
among other things, support for recent CPU
instructions like SSSE3,
SSE4.1, SSE4.2, etc.
Due to licensing issues, new versions of these applications will
not be integrated into the base system. Luckily, it is possible
to use a newer version of the GCC
compiler (e.g. version 4.4) with the help of the FreeBSD ports
tree.